I played a bit with aros again and looked at some community boards. But I don't see why someone exept old amiga fans should support this system.

My problems with it are that the whole architecture is totally outdated. No memory protection, no support for multiple processors and an api which is horrible. The device support is really bad and it is very buggy.

Do I have a wrong view of the system?
What do you think about that?
Or is it really a research only OS?

I think for a lot of these kinds of projects there doesn't need to be a "point" to it, it's just there for fun.

I had this argument with a colleague at work recently when I showed him the Haiku project. He couldn't understand why anyone would bother writing or using it, and that the OS market has no space for another operating system.

Being part of something like this has a lot to do with the community around it. Watching and getting excited about the small developments that make it more usable. Talking about it with other enthusiasts. Installing it on other hardware, and making it do things its not yet designed.

They're not for mainstream use, and they may well be "pointless" but at the end of the day, it's just a hobby. For the developers and the users. Much like classic cars.

"There's a saying that you should be careful what you wish for because you might just get it and AROS shows that it is a truism. If you're an old Amiga-head who has ever wished for a completely free Amiga that can run on modern, mainstream hardware, AROS is it. The snag is that the whole thing is based on a outdated principles. The lack of memory protection has always been the Achilles' heel of the whole Amiga system, and the programming API is very old now. I'm not sure that there exists a huge community of programmers who are still interested in developing for an Amiga-like operating system. By the time that everything that needs updating has been updated, you would end up with something that wouldn't resemble the Amiga at all. "